Pokemon of the Week: Weavile

Hello Hat Lovers!

With US Nats coming up this weekend this one will be short. I’ll be looking at Weavile, which I used in the June International Challenge. I faced two Weavile on Showdown in a row one night, and one caught me off guard with Feint. This got got me interested in Weavile. Back in 2013 I used an Infernape that had both Fake Out and Feint and it could result in a great first turn either by using Fake Out on the important target or using Feint to attack through a Protect.

Weavile can also do this so I paired it with Kangaskhan and aimed to get a Power-Up-Punch on the first turn against predicted double Protects or be able to Fake Out a target and still attack with Kangaskhan on that turn. Weavile could take care of Gengar and Garchomp with Night Slash and Ice Punch. This is the set I used:

Pickpocket acts like a Thief whenever Weavile makes contact with a foe. This means if an opponent knocks Weavile down to its Focus Sash with a physical attack I immediately take its item from it. This never produced interesting results during the tournament and the only Pokemon I ever ended up stealing from was Talonflame. This Ability proved to be near useless but I’d still use it for the once in a lifetime chance to have it do something. Weavile’s other Ability is Pressure which isn’t going to help much either.

Weavile didn’t perform especially well in the tournament, against the low level players I could never tell if they even carried Protect and when I faced high level players it seemed like a coin-toss whether or not they would try to Protect or just try to attack on the first turn. Situations where Weavile became useless where also frequent, neither of its attacks deal much damage when they aren’t super effective. When I did get a Feint + PoP off on a double Protect it pretty much won me the game right then and there, but the strategy often fell flat and left me with little momentum.

So while Weavile has potential, I don’t think its good enough to work at high levels. Its too easy to wall and it relies too heavily on predicting your opponent to generate momentum.